The Warrior's Captive Bride. Jenna Kernan

       Chapter One

      Three Moons Later

      Skylark’s father often hid in the trees, so she searched the branches overhead for any sign of movement. Earlier in the day she could hear him laughing at her from a thick canopy of pines and, after that, from a grove of brambles. But now the woods had gone silent except for the jays warning the other creatures that one of the people walked in their midst.

      “Father. I know you can hear me. Come out now.” She waited in the silence, broken only by a rustling that turned out to be a ground squirrel. Skylark flapped her hands in frustration. “They are striking the tepees! We are moving today. Auntie says you must come with us.”

      She wondered if she tried ignoring him, rather than searching, whether he might come out. Skylark crossed her arms. Such games might have been amusing when she was a girl. But she had seen twenty winters and spent much of each summer chasing after her father. What had begun as a game had become a burden.

      Her father was a trickster. She longed for a father who did not throw mud at her when she had just bathed in the river or who sat in the snow when everyone else huddled in their lodges close to the fire. His contrary ways were sometimes wonderful, but mostly they were just trouble.

      “I’m leaving without you.” Skylark waited, tapping her foot with impatience. “Fine,” she muttered, and began walking back the way she had come. With each step, she listened carefully for the thump of her father dropping down behind her or the creak of branches that might reveal him as he moved from tree to tree like a possum.

      This was the time of the Hunting Moon and the leaves above made good cover. Too good. She might pass directly underneath him and never know. Back at the river, the camp was struck. Some of the families were already moving and they would not wait for her. So of course, when the tribe was in a hurry, her father dawdled.

      Skylark sat on a downed log.

      Some said she was already a heyoka, because of her powers to heal. They came to her for care and treatment. But no man ever played his flute for her or asked her to stand wrapped in a buffalo robe before her aunt’s lodge. Only one man had dared touch her and look what had happened to him.

      Was it true? Did the young men avoid her because they feared her father’s power or because they feared having to take care of a man who was as unpredictable as the rain in the Fast Water Moon. If it was hot, her father shivered. If there was ice on the water, he went swimming. By doing everything the wrong way, he taught the people the correct way of doing things. When the people were sad, he could make them laugh. When they were happy and behaving foolishly, he wept, cautioning them against their folly.

      Or was the reason men avoided her, as her uncle said, because a man chose a wife who could make his clothing and keep their cooking pot full. That was something she would never do. She hated the stink of tanning hides.

      Her aunt said that if she stopped wandering in the woods she would not seem so odd. But the truth was she did not want to be like other women. Perhaps she was more like her father than she cared to admit.

      She missed her mother. Gathers Quills did not think Sky’s wandering was odd. But her mother had left this world for the Spirit World in the Freezing Moon of Sky’s seventieth winter.

      Winter Moon was the sister of her father and she said it was not seemly for a single woman to live alone with only the occasional company of her heyoka father. So Sky had moved in with her aunt and uncle, Wood Duck. Would Winter Moon have been so insistent that Sky live in her lodge if she had known that after the move there would still be no warriors to offer a bride’s dowry for Sky?

      Familiar laughter reached her. She did not pursue. Instead, she rested her head in her hands.

      Her father called himself Falling Otter, choosing that name because otters never fall. And because otters are playful.

      Once her father had been perfect in her eyes. Important. More important even than the chief because only he could question the chief and even sometimes mock the medicine man, something no one else was brave enough to do. He made the people think of things they had not before and that made him a powerful teacher. Didn’t it?

      Skylark indulged in tears and immediately heard laughter. She lifted her head to see Falling Otter dancing off with his loincloth on his head. This was exactly the sort of behavior that she found embarrassing, and then she felt guilty for her reaction.

      “Wait. Papa. We have to go.”

      “Daughter. Stay, stay. Stay all day,” he sang, and vanished into the thick shrubs.

      She hurried after him and decided that when she saw him again she would insist that they stay, stay, stay all day. Maybe that would get him moving back to camp. He was so thin now. Her aunt tried to feed him, but he insisted he was too full. Then he would beg food from someone else. Where had he left his horse?

      The ground changed from thick ferns and dried leaves to a stretch of exposed rock. She paused, glancing about the clearing, and a chill climbed up her neck. This was the very spot where she had met her warrior.

      He wasn’t hers, of course. But he had tried to make her so. She wondered what would have happened if she had let herself be taken.

      “Papa. I’m going to stay here. You should stay, too! No reason to go back and eat breakfast with Auntie. Your sister said to stay away. She doesn’t want you there.”

      She noticed the sunlight streaming down in golden beams through the tall trees, illuminating the small clearing. She spotted something of interest and paused to gather goosegrass. The roots made a nice red dye, but she collected the entire plant because it could also make the bowels move and cool a fevered body. She stuffed several handfuls of the spindly plants into her pouch noticing the tiny white flowers that bloomed all the way to the War Moon.

      She glanced about the clearing, recalling the man, his horse, his gray dog. Then it had happened. The sun had streamed down upon them, the light flashing off the new green leaves, shimmering like water from a lake. His dog had started to whine and then bark, his pointed ears up and alert. The warrior’s smile had dropped away, his eyes had rolled white and he had fallen as if shot. They had tumbled together from his horse, rolling on the soft mossy ground. But his body had gone limp and she feared he had died. His dog had been near frantic, but the animal had let her tend him. She’d had time to check him for wounds before the tremors began, shaking his entire body. She had seen it before. It was not the palsy of the old or a simple hand trembling, but full-out witchcraft frenzy. He was cursed by a witch or perhaps an enemy. At least, that was what she had learned from Spirit Bear, their shaman. That the ghosts of the fallen might haunt the living. Despite what some of her tribe said, she could not lift a curse or rescue the haunted. Only a shaman could do that.

      But her grandmother, Smiling One, had said that plants could heal any ills if only we knew which one to use. Was it true? Could all curses and maladies be healed?

      It was that possibility that sent her searching for the plant that could cure her mother. Her first and greatest failure. There had been others since, ones she could not save. She could heal many things, but not all things and not the malady that sent her warrior into fits.

      She had kept him from choking on the blood from his lacerated tongue, set